Decades of research in the fields of education and cognitive psychology have shown that the following skills are critical to learning to read proficiently:                Phonemic awareness        Letter-word correspondence skills        Fluent word recognition        Vocabulary        Comprehension skills        Appreciation of literature        
Once students have developed good phonemic awareness skills, research strongly supports concurrent training of the other five reading skills (letter-word correspondences, word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension, and appreciation of literature) as the next step towards reading fluency. Students learn to read most proficiently and quickly when all these skills are taught at the same time rather than sequentially.
Phonemic awareness is part of a broader skill set called phonological awareness, which is the ability to recognize and use all sizes of sound units, such as words, syllables, and phonemes. An extremely successful set of programs have been developed by Scientific Learning Corporation. They are called Fast ForWord Language, Fast ForWord Middle and High School, and Fast ForWord Language to Reading, information for which may be found at www.scientificlearning.com. However, up to this time, there has not been a program that adequately teaches the other five skills mentioned above, once phonological awareness has been developed.
Neuroscientific research has also found that there is a potent combination of elements that lead to efficient learning of new tasks and concepts:                Frequency        Intensity        Cross-training        Adaptivity        Motivation and attention        
What is needed is a program that incorporates the elements of frequency, intensity, cross-training, adaptivity, and motivation, while training students on foundational language skills such as letter-word correspondences, word recognition, vocabulary, comprehension, and appreciation of literature.